


Beyond the Scheme

by CancerianWastelandCat



Series: Drabbles [8]
Category: the GazettE
Genre: Angst, Blood, Drug Use, M/M, Mass Death, Mentions of Death, Sci-Fi AU, Utopia, open end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 04:17:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15380463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CancerianWastelandCat/pseuds/CancerianWastelandCat
Summary: An undetectable drug spreads amongst Tokio's civilians.





	Beyond the Scheme

**Author's Note:**

> Right, so.. I don’t really know what this is, to be honest. Some kind of Sci-Fi Utopia-Drug AU. Been sitting in my drafts for like half a year and I never had a plan for it, not even while I was finishing it. Just a rough outline was what I had really. So maybe someone will like this ^^’

**Phase 0**

It began seven years ago, taking over the market, color by color with each phase stronger and more destructive than the one before. People went down like flies, one after the other ripping wrists open and leaving rainbow splatters tainted by chemicals against the dirty brick walls of Tokyo. None of them knew it was just the beginning of a murder spree committed by more accomplices than they could count.  


**Phase I  
**

The second wave was taking over shortly after, and it took three days until Akira knocked at his front door in the middle of the night. Yutaka knew him too well, knew of his weaknesses and yet, he wasn’t prepared to see the unreal ring of color around Akira’s pupils. A light, somber purple that wrapped around black and bled into dirty brown greeted him after opening the door and hadn’t it been for the sly smirk on his lips, Yutaka wouldn’t have recognized him.

“Akira…”

He couldn’t ban the disappointment from his voice. 

“Babe, you know I had to try it.” 

Of course. Yutaka couldn’t remember a time where Akira had not been fascinated by everything forbidden. Damn him.

“I know. Come in.” 

Three hundred thousand people fell victim to the second wave.

  
**Phase II**

When the first notice of slit throats hit the public, panic took over. No one knew where the drug was coming from which caused everyone to suspect everyone else to be the source, the dealer behind it all. They didn’t know that it wasn’t pills, that it wasn’t even remotely close to alcohol or any of the likes.

Yutaka saw the images on his TV, aghast at what the chemical did to its consumers. Their blood was beaming in the color of the rainbow, dyeing the streets in a bright yellow that stung the eyes like a too-light neon add.

Akira refused to tell him where he got it from. Clearly there had to be someone behind it though. Officials seemed help- and clueless no matter what news broadcast they appeared in; hours, days, weeks apart from each other. And there wasn’t a thing that Yutaka didn’t try. The notion that Akira was in contact with whoever was in power behind this insanity terrified him so he did it all in an attempt to talk his boyfriend out of it. He tried to sweet-talk his way through the daze Akira had been in the night he’d come with an icy turquoise within his iris for the first time but he could have well been speaking against a wall. Yutaka begged, he screamed, he slammed doors and threw his phone across the room, he yelled and demanded to know _just why_ Akira kept coming back to him, kept burdening him with the terror and the ire and the anguish. 

He received his answer only once he was half intoxicated himself, from kisses and moans and thrusts, after Akira’s heaving body had rolled off of him and the drug in his eyes was blinding like a flashlight through the smoke of his cigarette.

 _You’re drug number two._  


**Phase III**

When the ring around Akira’s pupil turned green, corpses began to pile up on the streets. Their blood trickled across the dirty concrete roads and seeped into its gouges, illuminating whatever desolate storefront they lay before. There was no one there to clear them away. The drug spared no-one and surely no poor binmen.

Yutaka had no ounce of belief left for anything the media told them. Two police departments had been shut down for lack of officers. If even the people supposed to protect them were too scared to act, what he was supposed to do? The fact that the source still hadn’t been found only served to instill fear in the minds of all citizens, climbing up higher and higher until Yutaka found himself locking himself away for most of the time. If he dared to go outside … _it would get him._

Akira never seized his visits though. He would return, every other day, as if to check up on Yutaka. It was all too ironic. 

“You don’t have to come back.” 

The way Akira froze as he shrugged his leather jacket onto his shoulders made Yutaka swallow forcefully. Akira turned, his eyes shimmering like the depths of a Drezden Diamond with a hue of danger glazed across. 

“What did you say?” 

Yutaka crossed his arms in front of his chest, more of a defense mechanism than anything. Akira had never hurt him up until this point but every blind man could see that the drug was affecting him. Yutaka surely did. Something about Akira had to make a difference though, the crucial difference that didn’t turn him into a crazy person running around murdering people. Why was he … Why was he still in control of himself?  

“I said you don’t have to come back. I don’t…,” he gulped, “I don’t want anything to do with you anymore.” 

Saying it out loud hurt more than the countless times he had had to think it. But Yutaka knew it was necessary. There was only one thing he was more afraid of than he was of eventually losing Akira to insanity and that was for him to turn out being _one of them._ Yutaka couldn’t stand either of these thoughts. He had to get rid of them before they consumed him. He had to get rid of Akira before he broke his heart, one way or the other. 

“Yutaka… Are you sure?” 

The laugh creeping up his throat was hysterical. 

“Am I sure?!” he repeated, “No, I’m not fucking sure, Akira! I’m not sure of anything at this point, at all! But I know that you keep coming back to me, drugged to the brim _but sane_ and it’s scaring the hell out of me that you seem to be fine with what this is doing to everyone else. Are you in contact with whoever is behind this? Why don’t you tell them to stop it? Do you not care for what’s going on?” 

“Yuta- “

“Look out of the damn window!” 

His voice was rising in volume, arm outstretched to point towards the closed blinds while his body shook with incoming waves of tears. 

“They’re killing each other, Akira! Every fucking day!” he was bawling, “And you stand here as if it’s nothing! A-As if I couldn’t be next!”

“You won’t.”

Akira had remained calm. So eerily calm in fact that his words were all it took to bring Yutaka’s beginning breakdown to an abrupt halt. Sucking in a much needed breath, Yutaka narrowed his eyes after wiping at them. 

“What? How the fuck would you know that?” 

“Because it’s true. What you said,” Akira answered and straightened his shoulders, “I know the guys behind this.” 

Yutaka couldn’t even reply. Not for the first couple of seconds at least. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be that _his_ Akira had been an insider to this all this time, that he had done _nothing_. There was no way. 

“You… You have to be kidding me,” he shook his head, “Tell me you’re kidding. _Tell me you’re kidding!”_

“Let me explain, Yutaka, this is something so much bigger than any of us. They’re just weeding out the weak for what- “

“Weeding out _the weak?!”_

What the hell was he talking about? Yutaka didn’t understand a word he was hearing and he didn’t know if he even wanted to. Akira’s attempt to calm him went straight over his head and he slapped away the hands that reached for him. 

“What the fuck are you talking about? Is this the drug? Is it whatever they gave you?” 

“No, Yutaka, you need to _listen._ They’re testing, they- There are people who can _resist_ and they’re trying to find them by infecti- “ 

“And you knew all this time?!"

“ _Yes_ , but- ”

“Get out.”

Akira recoiled, his jaw tense. Yutaka felt fury seething in his blood and before he even knew, he was rushing forward and shoving a stumbling Akira down the narrow hallway of his apartment. 

“Get the fuck away from me, Akira,” he hissed prior to yanking the door open, feeling his throat going dry but he tried as best as he could to hold it in. 

“Don’t you dare come back. You’re just as guilty for standing by and- and letting those people kill each other when you _knew_ you could’ve at least tried to stop it.” 

Yutaka’s chest rose with another deep breath. He was unable to look at him so he kept his eyes focused on the wall opposite him but his heart was betraying him. The tremor settling in his lips and his fingertips was unmistakable. Akira took slow steps towards him, each sound like a tiny needle burying itself into Yutaka’s heart. As much as he tried to remain stubborn about his gaze, he couldn’t close his ears to Akira’s words.

“I’m trying to protect you, you see. As long as I’m alive, nothing will happen to you.” 

And they made him look up after all. Of course they did, because despite all the rage Yutaka had thrown at him, Akira still sounded so … genuine. So sober. And it was confusing to say the least. What was the meaning of all of this? 

Yutaka swallowed. His grip around the door knob tightened and him opening the door just a little bit more was enough to make Akira sigh. No, he just couldn’t deal with this any longer. 

“Just one more thing.” 

“Leave.” 

“It should be fine but just to be sure, don’t drink ta- “ 

Yutaka closed his eyes. _“Please.”_

The tiny little needles were the last thing he felt before the door fell close.

That night, a news station that, judging from the dirty brick walls in the background and the fuzzy television signal, looked like it had been set up in the slums announced that the number of victims had exceeded the three million mark.

  
**Phase IV**

Akira never came back. 

His words, however, did. They had started haunting Yutaka all the way into his dreams, echoing inside his mind until he was screaming himself awake and jolting up on his futon only to see the image of bright eyes staring at him fade into the darkness of his bedroom. 

Don’t drink what? What had Akira tried to say? What was it that he did to protect him? What was it that he was doing that had people falling like flies around him and yet Yutaka remained untouched? _Where_ was the drug coming from? 

He had long stopped going out. The only thing that still brought him out of his apartment building, which he was quite sure he was the last inhabitant of at this point, was the need for food. It wasn’t like real supermarkets still existed for depredation had rendered any and every store vacant but there was a man who sold necessities at the corner of the street. Yutaka never asked where the food came from, he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know. The man’s eye color was far from normal, something he hadn’t been able to ignore, yellow like a glaring ray of sunshine. Just another step down the spiral.

It brought back more memories, of what Akira had said, had attempted to explain. 

_There are people who can resist._

_I’m trying to protect you._

It brought back regret. Perhaps he shouldn’t have sent him away. Perhaps he should’ve asked him to stay instead, and if it was just for his own selfish reasons, to keep the loneliness away. Because it would rush over him at the most random times, when he was making his bed or washing rice, a feeling of lack as if his chest was imploding into itself, crumbling like the world around him. 

Akira was gone, and yet he had placed this bubble of security over him, an invisible blanket that, as Yutaka realized with agony in his heart, he would never be able to thank him for. 

_Where are you?_

**  
Phase V, two years later**

Someone, or something, was following him. Had been ever since he’d left the food stall two blocks down actually. The man with the yellow eyes had disappeared from one day to the next and Yutaka had seen himself forced to walk an extra mile just to get his hands on some food, quite literally.

The footsteps behind him never slowed down, adapting perfectly to his pace, picking it up when he did. Yutaka’s fingers took a firmer hold of the wrinkly plastic bag and while he could already see his apartment building down the street, his heartbeat was accelerating. He swallowed and began to walk quicker. After just a few meters, he heard an ugly coughing sound followed by something akin to a growl, an animalistic growl. Yutaka really shouldn’t have looked but he was still human so his reflexes got the best of him. 

He turned and gasped in horror, his eyes wide as saucers upon the sight. It wasn’t more than a heap of flesh stumbling on crooked legs with a face deformed beyond recognition. Was it a man or a woman? Yutaka couldn’t tell, he was too focused on the unreal, bright red ring in the creature’s hollow eyes and on the blood that came splashing out of its body, Green and Purple and Ice-blue gushing onto the dirty ground while it reached out for him with broken fingers. 

Yutaka whimpered and he twirled back around, willing his legs into a sprint. More coughing and gurgling followed right behind him, paired with the disgustingly wet sound of feet stepping into pools of blood. It only took a minute until Yutaka was out of breath and his chest began to tighten, heaving for breath after breath. He fought his way forward, panting and slithering around the debris of what used to be a ramen shop. Why had he decided to go out today?

A hurried glance over his shoulder helped in no way to relieve him, even though it looked like he was successfully shaking his pursuer off. Hot tears were streaming down his cheeks and his shopping bag was flapping wildly around his legs as he bridged meter after meter, the faster he ran the more vivid the image of Akira became, spurring him on from where it was burnt into his eyelids.

_Let me live, let me live, let me live. Protect me, please! Wherever you are, Aki, I’m begging-  
_

He was sobbing by the time he reached the front door, the last thing he saw an empty road before he slammed it shut and pressed his back against it before sliding down to the floor.

“Where are you when I need you!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, listening to the concrete walls that swallowed his voice and left nothing but silence in its place. Yutaka reclined his head erand wiped the back of his hand over his eyes.  

He couldn’t keep going like this. What if this would happen every time he would have to go out? He couldn’t continue to live in fear of every next day. No, he… he had to find Akira. It was a forlorn hope but the only one he had.

It could have well been another ten minutes that passed until Yutaka managed to drag himself back up on his feet. After conquering the steps to his apartment one by one, he refrained to dumping the bag in the hallway and made his way straight into the bathroom. His hair was a mess and his throat dry as a desert. Still trembling, his fingers found the tap and twisted it open hastily but nothing happened.

Yutaka frowned and sniffed, closing the faucet and opening it again, several times at that but the only thing he got was a low burble coming from within the water pipe that stretched across the tiled wall. 

“Oh please,” Yutaka pleaded under his breath and roughed a hand through his hair, “please don’t do this.” 

Taking a step back, he closed his eyes, swallowing in an attempt to his calm his racing heart. Surely it was just a minor defect. This had happened before, there was dirt stuck in the conduit or… or something like that. It was going to work just fine if he tried again. Reaching for the tap once more, Yutaka opened it and stared intently at the sink where he held his hands in a ready position.

His prayers were heard. The copper tube began to jerk and after a few seconds, the first spurts of water sloshed into his hungry palms, leaving him with a relieved sigh. He splashed the water into his face, rubbing over his forehead and lids before he gathered some in his palms and drank from it.

In the blink of an eye, Yutaka’s knees gave in and he crashed to the floor. Instinctively, his hand shot up to his throat as if that was going to alleviate the feeling of it being corded up terribly tight, and he coughed and hammered against his chest until his ribcage was aching from the impact. 

In the blink of an eye, it was all over again. The string around his neck vanished and Yutaka audibly gasped for breath, eagerly drawing in the air that flooded his lungs. What the hell was this? What was-

His arms were glowing. 

It wasn’t even an understatement. Suddenly, his skin appeared thin like parchment paper and the veins beneath it were _glowing_ in all colors of the rainbow, even seemed to be wriggling around like they had come to life. Yutaka scrambled backwards until his back hit the toilet and he groaned, only now realizing that there was no escape. Something was _moving_ inside his arms but it didn’t… it didn’t hurt. Stretching out his arms in front of him, he watched in complete bewilderment how the colors mixed together into a blazing white that had him squinting his eyes before they separated again, travelling up towards his shoulders and down to his fingertips like miniature snakes. Then, a pulsation rolled through Yutaka’s body and his skin was back to normal. 

He blinked. Had he just imagined this? No, it couldn’t be. He had certainly felt something and you couldn’t just make sensations up, could you? 

God, he needed to get away from here! Yutaka extended his hands until they reached the edge of the sink and he could pull himself up once more, albeit it sent a small shot of pain throughout his whole body. 

Once his gaze fell upon the faucet, however, he froze in plae. Like paralyzed, he looked and looked until it fell like scales from his eyes. That was it, right? That was what Akira had wanted to say, the words Yutaka had cut off. His heartrate picked up instantly but there was no one chasing him this time, no one real, no one physical, just the notion of what… what this meant. 

_As long as I’m alive, nothing will happen to you._

His head snapped up before he could stop it, before he could scream at his heart that he didn’t want to see it, and Yutaka stared, he stared through a veil of tears, but he stared straight into the most violently purple eyes he had ever seen.

Tears spilled out of them like a waterfall, across his cheeks and the hand that was pressed atop his quivering lips. He didn’t look like himself anymore and there was a strange feeling of uneasiness settling in the depths of his stomach, akin to a dull sort of hum. But it was of no comparison to the painful wrench of his heart inside his chest.

Akira’s bubble of safety had burst.  
  
  
  
  
**Phase I.**

**Author's Note:**

> Did you figure out the happenings here? Let me know your thoughts! I appreciate them all, and thank you for reading! :)


End file.
